You call your book THE PREDATOR STATE, what do you mean predator?
“JAMES GALBRAITH: What I mean is the people who took over the government were not interested in reducing the government and having a small government, the conservative principle. They were interested in using these great institutions for private benefit, to place them in the control of their friends and to put them to the use of their clients. They wanted to privatize Social Security. They created a Medicare drug benefit in such a way as to create the maximum profit for pharmaceutical companies.
They used trade agreements to extend patent protections for various interests or to promote the expansion of the corporate agriculture’s markets in the third world. A whole range of things that were basically political and clientelistic. That’s the predator state.”
That has been the way of previous governments, to enact laws that favoured corporate behaviour, corporate interests, corporate profits and extend the interest of the companies as much as possible.
Read this book: “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too” Written by James K Galbraith. We cannot remain in ignorance any more.
Read “The Crash of 1929” by John Kenneth Galbraith too. It shows just how closely what we are all living through parallels that time, but with some exceptions.
All around the world stock markets plummet, and there have been so many people thinking on this that some may end up with a headache trying to figure it out.
My own thinking, sans headache, is this. Banks, investment houses, lenders of all kinds as well as those who have bought into CDS and other hidden “instruments” are now being asked to repay, restore, and get the money back to those they owe. How can they do that? Sell off stocks,even at low prices, to pay up.
Remember there are a huge number of those hidden “instruments” now coming due. When the two investment houses, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs both went to full-service banks, they cut out a huge amount of funding to those who were in the investments. That money is no longer there.
Shorter version, the debts are now being called, and demands for payment are here. This time there is no room for renegotiation, no putting off “paying the piper” so the markets are seeing pain.
Federal Deficits. There is a howling going around about them. How can any country live with an increase in the national deficit. Well, the cold, hard truth is that there is NO other choice. A country can either refuse to go into debt and see the deficit rise regardless, or use the borrowing capacity to make decisions that will shorten or lighten the harsh reality down the road. I am not alone here in thinking this.
It’s the dollar or nothing. So the United States basically can finance itself to the extent necessary to deal with this crisis. And I’m right now quite sanguine about that, quite confident that we won’t face a problem.
James K Galbraith
October 28, 2008 at 8:54 am |
[...] Man wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptYou call your book THE PREDATOR STATE, what do you mean predator? “JAMES GALBRAITH: What I mean is the people who took over the government were not interested in reducing the government and having a small government, the conservative principle. They were interested in using these great institutions for private benefit, to place them in the control of their friends and to put them to the use of their clients. They wanted to privatize Social Security. They created a Medicare drug benefit in such a way as to create the maximum profit for pharmaceutical companies. They used trade agreements to extend patent protections for various interests or to promote the expansion of the corporate agriculture’s markets in the third world. A whole range of things that were basically political and clientelistic. That’s the predator state.” That has been the way of previous governments, to enact laws that favoured corporate behaviour, corporate interests, corporate […] [...]
February 6, 2009 at 11:32 pm |
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